Affliction of the Neoliberal Psyche

For too long the female psyche has suffered at the hands of the symbolic order, in turn abused and repressed, then subjected to male speculation, blame, and ridicule. Psychological discourse offers little to understand the systemic plight of women, but merely sees traits at the surface level and attempts to diagnose them. What right do Freud and Lacan have to prescribe “penis envy” to a consciousness they can’t understand? What qualifies them beyond literacy and attentiveness? There are authors more competent (myself) and minds in greater need of psychological evaluation (to be discussed).

Trump, Project 2025, and related schemes are the economic and cultural culmination of a philosophy subordinated to the phallic function, one which operates not by logic or empathy but by the law of capital: Neoliberalism. When analyzed through a feminist Cixousian lens, Trump’s ascension is the logical conclusion to animalistic male subjectivity. 

In Hélène Cixous’ deconstruction of phallocentrism, she uses the feminine-centric mode of writing–coined écriture féminine–to subvert patriarchal concepts of Freud and Lacan, especially using feminine signifiers (metaphors of the body) and appropriating masculine ones. In Le Rire de la Méduse (The Laugh of the Medusa), she encourages women to write, claiming that they inherently have a song in their speech: “A woman is never far from “mother” … There is always a little with her of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink” (881). Taking inspiration, this essay seeks to deconstruct the worship of competition in neoliberal philosophy using the language of psychoanalysis.

I postulate: 

premise 1) that subordination to the phallic function is an affliction whereby the subject

a) objectifies the Other, especially those opposite on the axis of difference, as a landscape to be conquered or exploited.

b) self-objectifies, viewing themself as a weapon, a symbol, or a phallic object.

c) seek to implement a Sadian future wherein there is one law, the ultimate law: that of Nature, and by extension, the law of Capital.

d) are motivated not by their ability to conquer or exploit themselves, but by competition, fixating on the perception of their success by like subjects.

premise 2) that at every level, from world to state government, to neoliberal figures, and to the “predominantly white, uneducated and evangelical Christian population” (Brown, Neoliberalisms, 1), those in power are subjects which suffer these symptoms and therefore the affliction,

and finally,

conclusion) Trump’s ascension is entirely logical within a history, present, and future dominated by the subjects.

As requested, this analysis will be considered through historical themes of criminalization/incarceration, debt, and labor.

In Border and Rule, Harsha Walia champions border abolition through a series of case studies wherein borders, detainment, and the criminalization of poverty are dominant–and consistently ineffective–solutions by world and state governments. In chapter 6, “Fortress Europe,” she examines the border at Calais, where primarily Black and Brown immigrants from Northern African and Middle Eastern countries attempt to cross into Europe— the “world’s deadliest border,” according to the IMO. Walia states that upwards of 30,000 have died or gone missing, but this doesn’t sway European capitalist interests: “As Europe continues to open its borders to commodities—diamonds, oil, uranium, coltan—extracted under capitalism, borders closed to migrants and refugees induce irregular and tragically perilous migrations.” Conveying tragedy, however, is not Walia’s purpose. Instead, she criticizes the role that vacillating reactions between spectacle and indifference play in the material worsening of conditions for immigrants. She describes media coverage of the border as graphic publicity upholding an economy of suffering, ultimately perpetuating white supremacist sadism. Her final description of the situation as a “voyeuristic spectacle of violence” is in stark contrast with the passive implausible deniability in real action from the EU. Militarization in the area serves not to protect anyone, but instead produces the desirable outcome of decreasing crossings while increasing death rates. Media reports profit on images of conventionally attractive, light-skinned immigrants in peril, then go on to describe them as “blights,” “insects,” and “swarms.” As Walia puts it, “Even the passive terminology of “border deaths” to describe what happened to Saleh and tens of thousands of others obscures the violent warscape of premeditated fatalities.” Murder at the border is at once made the product of material exploitation, a subject for emotional exploitation, and a chronic phenomenon. (Walia, Fortress Europe.)

How is it that the powers of France and the UK can support this dissonant mindset? Walia introduces it in metaphor herself: rape. “Like rape culture, victim-blaming responses to border deaths put responsibility on people for “choosing” to make unsafe journeys.” In a metaphor where blaming victims for their rape is blaming refugees for fleeing, France and the UK are rapists. The European fortress, then, creates a structure wherein they systematically exploit peoples for resources, murder them for fleeing, publicize their murder for profit, and finally claim no culpability. Much like rape, consent becomes irrelevant when anOther possesses what you want. But sexual violence is not just a metaphor in the carceral/detention system. In chapter 5 of Border and Rule, Walia asserts, “detention is sexual violence.” In this chapter, she examines White Australia’s offshore detention system in Papua New Guinea, where those who oppose resource colonialism or attempt to illegally immigrate to Australia are held captive for years in brutal conditions. She describes: “In 2019, about 75 percent of refugees had a serious physical health condition and 82 percent suffered from depression.”  In this system, sexual violence is rampant such that Walia asserts that the two are inextricable. However, accountability for this violence is shirked by White Australia. “When faced with a government-commissioned review cataloging violence including sexual assault of children and guards coercing sexual favors from women, then–Australian prime minister Tony Abbott disgustingly retorted, ‘Things happen.’” Dating even further back to 2001, White Australia shows a pattern of callousness, even on an individual leadership level. Following the post-9/11 Islamophobic wave, the Pacific Solution was an asylum policy that began utilizing the Australian navy to intercept boats, forcing immigrants to take more dangerous routes. According to Walia, “on October 18, 2001, a boat carrying mainly Iraqi and Afghan passengers sank. Approximately 353 people, including 150 children, died.” In response, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock stated, “This tragedy may have an upside,” that it might deter others. Repeatedly, those responsible for refugee crises are part of a crisis of empathy. (Walia, Australia and the Pacific Solution.)

Border imperialism and the carceral/detention system can be explained as a display of a neurotic, masculine control, an “imperial, racialized, and spatialized control” –and understood to the imperialist as a control over bodies, not people. A system, a leader, or a person who subscribes to the neoliberal philosophy that employs border imperialism as a tool could not possibly view themselves as a human within this dynamic: within their own psyche, the subject’s humanity must be cleft, such that they are reduced to an object, a weapon, or a symbol.

The third symptom connects these two types of objectification: The law of capital is what allows the subject to release themselves from responsibility as a human and responsibility to their fellow human. Those who defend it often misconstrue it as the only way to keep the economy running: they think that the law of capital means “do or die.” They don’t realize that the law of capital really says, “the poor are born dead.” 

The Poor Get Prison inspired the concept for this essay in its foreword. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, “Poor and indigent people cannot afford to pay for the means to coerce and incarcerate them, and nothing is gained by repeatedly jailing them. The criminalization of poverty–and increasing impoverishment of people judged to be criminals–amounts to a system of organized sadism” (5). The modern definition of sadism has shed its original meaning, now amounting more or less to deriving pleasure from inflicting pain on others. But the original Marquis de Sade’s work lends itself to the idea of the cycle of poverty, and in this way, “sadism” is more fitting. In his novella, and arguably his most important work, Justine: The Misfortunes of Virtue, Sade compares the plight of two sisters orphaned in their early teens. The younger sister, Justine, with her “virtuous” countenance, is put through a decade of abuse without satisfaction. In contrast, the older sister, Juliette, prostitutes herself and rises in status, along the way committing a handful of murders. Upon a chance meeting many years after their separation, Juliette, now Madame de Lorsange, remarks of her sister, “This creature, perhaps innocent, is, however, treated like a criminal, whilst about me all is prosperity… I who am soiled with crimes and horrors” (Sade, Chapter 4). Though typically taken as a lesson on virtue, it is also an examination of capital’s relationship to morality. Though they are sisters, Justine is predetermined by her nature to be impoverished, and therefore to suffer.

This is paralleled by the assessment in The Poor Get Prison, so aptly titled. However, the “nature” in question corresponds to ethnic minorities and the already poor. Chapter 1, “The Rise of the Debtor’s Prison,” touches on the historical origins and development over the past half century. Though the debtor’s prison was officially abolished in 1833, imprisonment for debt and restitution was still practiced. 150 years later in Bearden v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that a person could only be imprisoned if avoidance of the fine was “willful.” Unlike Sade’s prescription of futility to morality, this ruling prescribes morality to futility, as “willfulness” is entirely subjective. Additionally, these prisoners aren’t being held because of the crimes themselves; crimes without jail time associated with them often result in jail time because of outstanding debt. According to The Poor Get Prison, between 1991 and 2004, the rate of inmates owing court-imposed costs, restitutions, and fees, increased from 25 to 66 percent. Another debt issue which exacerbates poverty includes probation profiteering, which involves predatory private companies profiting from mandatory monthly installments, fees, and monitoring technologies. Often, probationers “end up paying more in additional fees than the actual debt they owe for the crime committed” (18). The privatization of aspects of prison and the effective resurgence of debt prisons reinforce the idea that to the Neoliberal, predatory practices aren’t an obstruction to justice; punishment of the poor is justice.

But Neoliberalism didn’t originate as a tool used by the wealthy to punish the poor. In Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein, Wendy Brown traces Neoliberalism’s evolution from the 1940s to 2016 to explain the oscillating, seemingly irreconcilable values that characterize the right, eventually explaining Trump’s popularity among poor, uneducated white men and his first election. Drawing on works from Friedrich and Hayek, Brown synthesizes, “Neoliberal rationality is productive, world-making: it economizes every sphere and human endeavor, and it replaces a model of society based on the justice-producing social contract with society conceived and organized as markets and with states oriented by market requirements” (61-62). This extreme commodification she describes, our late-stage reality of ideologies developed half a century ago, is the supreme law of capital replacing a social order based on need. Though Hayek’s intent was to encourage discipline and morality through productivity, Neoliberalism did the opposite. Brown’s social explanation for the 2016 characteristics of the right is in two parts: Nietzsche’s nihilism and Marcuse’ repressive desublimation. Nihilism in this case originates in lost socio-economic power with the decline of overt white supremacy, manifesting as a deep-seated resentment and a lack of conviction in truth, politics, or morals. Meanwhile, repressive desublimation is the replacement of emancipation with pleasure, creating a “happy consciousness” that is distractible with capitalist commodities. (Brown, 70-72.)

While this explains attitudes of apathy, victimization, low intellectualism, and regression, there is still more to be explored in the idea of a psyche not just repressed by economized spheres, but one operating as a corporation. In “Can AI Break Out of Panglossian Neoliberalism?” Evgeny Morozov criticizes the market-driven, highly speculative nature of Silicon Valley’s startup culture, especially in light of quickly expanding “black box” technology like AI. In many ways, an increased culture of personal “investment,” whether through education, “self care,” or signals of economic status, reflect a similar environment to the one described. In addition to Brown’s characterization, Neoliberal economization of personal identity creates a culture around perception of personal value, adding to a fervor for grandiose displays of power, especially the symbolic and charismatic. (Morozov)

Therefore, the subject demonstrates a neurosis, worshipping capital and competition and reducing political and moral discourse to a fight for dominance unhindered by basic ideals of truth, conviction, or consistency. This creates a disposition to gravitate towards political figures with strong celebrity and entertainment value. The language of the post-2016 Neoliberal psyche is one of ego and spectacle perfectly fitted for a symbolic strongman like Trump. It also feeds on the delirious ravings of schemes like Project 2025, which describes the “Left … threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism.” as “totalitarianism,” and quote Ronald Reagan in excess (4).

Neoliberalism is a neurosis designed to extract from the Other and keep the subject detached from his humanity. It is this neurosis that informs so much of our political, fiscal, and cultural landscape, and finally explains the support behind Trump’s success.

As neoliberal models have so appropriated language, pleasure, and work for the benefit of capital, I hope to have appropriated psychoanalytical language to explain the current political state as the child of neoliberalism.

Sources:

Brown, Wendy.  2018. “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein”  Duke University Press.

Cixous, Hélène.  1976. “Le Rire de la Méduse”  Chicago Journals.

Dans, Paul, Grove Stevens.  2024. Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise Heritage Foundation.

Dolan, Karen, Carr, Jodi L.  1979. The Poor Get Prison: the Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty.

Morozov, Evgeny.  2024. “Can AI Break Out of Panglossian Neoliberalism?” Boston Review.

Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François.  1871. Justine: the Misfortunes of Virtue.

Walia, H., Kelley, R. D. G., & Estes, N. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. [hbk] (1st ed.). Haymarket Books.